Storage and channel manufacturer LSI today announced the release of its new PCIe – based WarpDrive solid-stage storage drive. Going by the specs, the WarpDrive is so fast it can go around the earth before you can say WarpDrive.

When it comes to enterprise class performance in SSDs, there is nothing that can compare to PCIe drives. Even among these, LSI’s WarpDrive falls into a class of its own. For starters it is a 300GB piece of storage space. Second, it is based on SLC memory, which throws out an astounding 1,400MB/sec of sustained throughput. In random 4k operations, the figures are even more impressive – 240,000 IOPS while reading and 200,000 IOPS while writing.

If we consider regular drives, the WarpDrive is the equivalent of 400 such devices put together in terms of IOPS power; and it does all this while consuming 300 times lower power – the WarpDrive needs just 25W to get going. These numbers make the WarpDrive second only to Fusion-io’s ioDrive Duo and way ahead of OCZ’s RevoDrive X2.

Now the 400 drives mentioned above would require about 36U of rack space… compare this with the WarpDrive while is half-length and so easily fits into a standard 8 lane PCIe Gen 2.0 server slot. In that sense, it is superior to the ioDrive Duo as the latter needs a full height PCI slot.

That’s a lot of talk about specs; now let us talk about pricing. The Fusion-io ioDrive Duo costs a whopping $14,000, enough to burn a major hole through all pockets. LSI has put up an absolute winner here – the WarpDrive is priced at a much lower $11,500, which should make it a much more attractive package for enterprise customers. Of course, they will have to wait until November 29 to get their hands on this speed devil.